Local resident Kevin Hill has become a familiar face over the past five months as stakeholders gather to plan the future of Harvard’s riverfront land in Cambridge.

Armed with detailed diagrams and colorful posters, Hill has repeatedly demanded to be placed on meeting agendas to register his complaints with Harvard’s proposed development of the Riverside neighborhood and present his 21 alternative designs.

Hill’s time to speak has been kept short as city politicians, neighborhood representatives, and Harvard officials focus on moving ahead with a compromise plan for the University’s construction of faculty and affiliate housing.

And despite Hill’s profanity-laced objections, Harvard’s expansion plans received the unanimous approval of the city Planning Board last December. Construction was set to begin this spring on Harvard’s two Riverside properties—one sandwiched between Leverett and Mather Houses, and the other down Memorial Drive at the former site of Mahoney’s Garden Center.

But Feb. 24, Hill filed an appeal that will delay Harvard’s expansion on the Memorial Drive plot, which sits adjacent to Hill’s home.

“My family has been here between 70 and 50 years,” Hill says. “I’m fighting power and money. Why should they prevail?”

Hill’s last-minute appeal of the construction permit—and the continued debates over architectural designs on Harvard’s other site—reveals a lingering bitterness among residents in a neighborhood whose history is fraught with town-gown tension.

Harvard’s Senior Director of Community Relations Mary H. Power says she hopes to reach a positive resolution so the University and the city can move forward in implementing the compromise development plan, which offers benefits to both sides.

But, she adds, “When things become lawsuits it limits our ability to engage in dialogue.”

GROWING PAINS

The ivory tower began in a cow pasture. From its humble origins, Harvard has grown into the largest land-owner in Cambridge—but its development has caused its share of growing pains.

University officials argue that expansion is vital to Harvard’s success in the twenty-first century. Attracting top-notch faculty and students—particularly in the sciences—depends on maintaining up-to-date laboratories and providing housing. But this is a hard case to make to residents who for over thirty years have watched a seemingly unending advance of Harvard high rises into their neighborhoods.

The bad blood runs especially deep in Riverside, the historically working-class neighborhood where Irish and black families felt they were pushed aside to make room for Mather House and Peabody Terrace.

In 1970, residents protested at Commencement, marching into Harvard Yard and mounting the stage during the ceremony.

More recently, residents harbor resentment about the construction of the DeWolfe Street apartments in the early 1990s, which they say Harvard promised would be faculty, not student, housing.